“Swamp Sparrow as Housewife”
In the morning I come to you like a baby sparrow—my eyes can’t see straight. Where is our son? What does it mean to be a woman or person or bird or bed or falling chunk of sky? When you go, in the heat of the
Category Archives: Poetry
“Things We Need To Speak Of”
Antlers half-buried in the mud like a cabin shut deep in the woods that nobody enters a grizzly hibernating within that dream of the salmon who never returns to the drying river a farmer must look away from the harvest the cities are not meant
“The Alchemist”
She snaked down the sky like ibis sweeping the landscape of snow, palpatating on telegraph line. A concentric point of red dared into the susurrus of pale, she grew trust to barrier island beneath, beguiling the steady strums of windsong with her flight. Loose hair frosted the
“The Bold Magic of Trees”
By the late afternoon, everyone has grown trail weary and lounges in camp chairs reading novels or searching maps for what they’ll find tomorrow, and that’s when I like to go into the trees and find the husks of trunks that will make tonight’s fire.
“The Night”
“Solitude is to turn your back to the world. Sadness is when the world turns its back to you.” Ngondo Moyula The day when the night will disappear It will disappear without warning Drowning dreams in the wells It will disappear The night Androgynous witch
Midnight Hives
The harvest moon is six hours late and I can’t catch up. Houses, fences, cars dive into the dark like wrecked ships. I gain my bearings— shadows move through the field, corrupt ghosts whose dirty hands drag the grass— and listen for the hum of
Bathing in the Creek
The female llamas make sucking noises as they drink. They bat their tails sideways. As they bed down, the creek’s waves roll over their coats in laps. They moisten their necks on the rocks and rub their wool clean. The males press their chests into
Self-Portrait as Soft Rot
This is how the waking goes: sickly sweet trill of birdsong against glass the near-transparent world returned to life sharpening figures my mouth rounds into that first silent syllable that proves the dream hasn’t ended in the expected kind of light I think there’s too
Physics of Fire
We drove along the edge of the burn line, right down to the Columbia River, 70 mph with the windows rolled up. One month and 50 percent-contained, the air tasted like char and the sea. Saw where fire fell upwards and cascaded into wind, jumped
Echolocation
Let’s work this out in the dark. I find you, you find me. A snapshot under a streetlight’s warm brim, small furred mouths taking moth bodies whole. Intimacy is blood in the pitched chambers, trace and return, the long-foretold figure-eight of oxygenated rush. It requires